


Dulce et decorum

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Bolkonsky family dynamics, Decembrist Revolt (1825), Gen, Lots of Angst, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 21:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15519456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: In December 1825, the Tsar's troops put down a revolt in the Senate Square. In January 1826, Marya visits her nephew for the last time.





	Dulce et decorum

It is two days before they allow her to see him, two days of waiting and supplicating and not knowing where he is being held. She is almost beginning to lose hope when, on the third morning, a courier arrives with a message informing her that the necessary permission has been granted, and instructing her to present herself at three o’clock at the gates to the fortress of Peter and Paul.

Like a criminal, she thinks as the guards lead her past the walls. She corrects herself. He is a criminal now, a traitor, a conspirator against the Tsar. And yet when she sees him she sees only little Nikolenka, that frightened and motherless boy.

His cell is small and airless, but the straw is at least clean. He looks up sharply when the guard jangles the keys, and the look on his face is one of pure shock. He did not, evidently, expect her to come.

“Aunt Masha,” he says finally, his voice betraying no emotion.

“Good afternoon, Kolya.” She turns to the guard, who is idling uncertainly just outside the door. “You may leave us.”

“My lady, visitors must be supervised.”

“I understand. But I am here to see my nephew, and I wish you would oblige me by waiting at the end of the hall.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his polished black boots. “I’m terribly sorry, my lady. I am under orders.”

She can feel the anger flaring up inside her, a month of fear and worry and effort and shame pent up and ready to be unleashed. “Your orders,” she says, “are to prevent anyone from passing clandestine or seditious information to the residents of this fortress. Do you think that I am here to pass on seditious information?”

“No, my lady, but—“

“My father spent years fighting for this country, and my brother died for it. Do you wish to dishonor their memory? Do you wish to implicate my husband, who is a veteran of the wars and as loyal a subject as can be found anywhere in the empire? Do you accuse them of treason?”

“N-no, my lady.”

“Then you will wait at the end of the hall.”

It is a tense moment before he does so, backing away to stand near the window across from the stairwell. His back is to her, and guilt sweeps Marya instantly. She has always hated being angry, especially when she loses control. It is her father’s temper, and she has been on the other side of it too many times to feel anything but remorse.

Bu she has greater concerns. Suppressing the feeling, she turns back to look at her nephew, who has not moved from the position she found him in. In the past few weeks there have been a thousand questions she wanted to ask him— _Why did you do it? Have you gone mad? Did you realize what would happen to you? What could possibly be worth this?_ But now all those questions have fallen away, and there is only one thing she urgently wishes to know.

“We heard,” she says, “that you have been sentenced to exile.”

His voice is hoarse when he replies. “Yes.”

“Where?”

“Nerchinsk.”

Marya’s heart plummets. Nerchinsk. Transbaikal. So they really do mean for him never to return.

“I don’t regret it.”

The sound of his voice, sharper and clearer than it was a moment ago, startles her out of her grief.

“If you’ve come to try and convince me to—to take it back, and to beg them, I won’t do it. They wouldn’t listen to me anyway, and even if they would—I wouldn’t do it. You might think me the greatest fool in the world, but I knew what I was doing, and I don’t regret it. I would do it again!”

His face has grown flushed, and all Marya can think about is how young he is. Twenty. Some of the rebels have wives petitioning to join them, but Nikolenka has no wife, no mother, no sister. No one at all, in fact, but Marya.

“Do you hear me? So if you’re going to bring my uncle in to tell me to apologize for it, then I won’t. You won’t convince me.”

“Your uncle isn’t here,” she tells him. “Only me.” Nikolai—her husband—had not pressed her to encourage Kolya to repent. In fact, he had tried desperately to convince her not to go. He was afraid of losing her, afraid that if she went into the viper’s nest she would somehow never get out. There was, he said, nothing she could do that would help Nikolenka—not now, not for something like this. He had, of course, been right. But he could not stop her. They were not like Pierre and Natasha; Marya’s life and thoughts had never been so closely synchronized with her husband’s. There were certain affairs that were purely his, and there were certain affairs, like this one, that were purely hers. That, in the end, was how she had explained it to him: it was an obligation to her brother, something for her and her alone to do.

She takes a deep breath, to steady herself. “If I thought that your apologies would do anything I would tell you to make them. But I know very well that there is no going back. I came only to speak with you before you go.”

Despite her reassurances, his eyes are still guarded. “You didn’t have to do this, Aunt Masha. This doesn’t concern you.”

“You concern me.” And it’s true, no matter how much he might wish it wasn’t. No matter how much she might secretly wish the same, when she is feeling most acutely inadequate.

He looks at her now, as if studying her. “I suppose you want to know why I did it?”

“I assume you believed it was the right thing to do.”

“It was. It—I don’t expect you to understand.”

“You’re right,” she sighs. “I don’t understand it.” Oh, she understands the principle well enough: a constitution, freedom of speech, equality before the law. The same ideals that her father used to preach. But her father never considered rebellion. He read Voltaire in the morning and managed his serfs in the afternoon, and so Marya had never imagined that Nikolenka’s ideals and his reading circles would lead to something like this.

“You are going to need money,” she tells him now, “and you must not hesitate to ask for it.” It will be spring, she thinks, by the time they get him there, after the judgments and the preparations and the long march across the continent. She hopes that will give him time.

“And what will Count Rostov say when he hears you are sending his money to a criminal?”

“Your uncle won’t object,” she says. Imprisonment and sentencing have not softened his instinctive enmity toward Nikolai. It has been ever-present for the past five years, a reflexive and mutual distrust, and nothing Marya has done has alleviated it. And yet how little they understand each other, she thinks. Even now.

“I promise that we will supply you with whatever you need. But you must ask. Part of it would have been yours anyway, when you came into your inheritance next year.”  
“The government would only have confiscated it. How very lucky we all are.”

It is this habit of his, of deflecting with sharp words, that reminds her most pointedly of Andrei. With Andrei it always shocked and confused her, and she never knew how to respond to it. But now she understands a little more of life than she did when she was eighteen, and she can see, beneath the veneer of cynicism, how brave and how terrified he is.

“Nevertheless,” she says, “it’s yours. But we can’t help you unless you write to us and tell us what you need. I want you to promise that you will.”

She can tell that he wants to object—he is poised on the edge of the cot as if to strike—but she stops him before he can.

“When your father died,”—he looks up sharply, surprise outweighing hostility—“When your father died I promised him that I would take care of you. I swore it to him. I won’t be able to rest unless I know that I am keeping that promise.”

For a moment she thinks he is going to protest, and then she won’t know what to say, but finally he gives a sigh of surrender.

“Very well, then. I promise.” He doesn’t look at her when he says it, but she knows that he will keep it.

“Thank you,” she says, and means it.

He still regards her with suspicion, but it is blunted now, the hostility only a front. Now she has done everything she came here to do, everything anyone could expect from her. She has discharged every duty but the one burning a hole in her reticule where she clutches it in her lap.

Her hand shakes as she withdraws the icon.

Nikolenka bends over to look at it, curiosity outweighing his caution. The paint, by now, is cracked, and the gilt dulled, the chain tarnished. She can see the implicit rejection in his eyes, and it reminds her so much of Andrei that for a moment she feels she is there in her father’s hall again, attempting to convince him.

“When your father went away to war,” she tells him, “I gave him this icon. I made him promise that he would wear it always, for protection. He thought it was foolish—he thought all such things were foolish—but he wore it anyway. Until—until the end.”

His eyes widen, understanding dawning on him. For a moment he stares silently at the little image in her hand. And then he lurches forward suddenly, burying his head in her shoulder, and even she is shocked when she feels his tears seeping into the velvet of her gown. Her hand comes up to stroke his hair, as she used to in the year after Andrei died, when he would wake the house sobbing from his nightmares. But she cannot save him from this.

“It will be all right,” she says anyway, and she believes it. Fiercely, defiantly—she believes.

He lifts his head now, fighting back the tears he has not spilled. “My father,” he says. “He—he would have done the same thing?”

No, she thinks immediately. He would not have. Andrei would no sooner have thought of treason than he would have thought of murder. Nikolenka never knew his father, not really, and not all the stories he has begged her to tell him could tarnish his sacred image. His own icon, she supposes, to be worshiped and to be invoked in times of need.

“Your father,” she says, “loved you. He loves you even now. I am sure that would proud of you—of the man you’ve become. As I am.”  
He pulls away from her with a last, shaken sigh, and she bends after him to hang the icon around his neck. His cheeks are slightly pink, which is strangely comforting—that even in a time like this he can find it in him to be embarrassed for clinging to his aunt’s skirts.

“Countess Rostova.”

The voice is unfamiliar, and when she turns she sees the guard captain who first received her, with the other guard trailing uncertainly behind. Of course. She stands immediately.

“Yes?” she says.

“It is time for you to leave.” His voice is gruff but not unsympathetic, and she understands. This is mercy. There are worse things he could have done to her, or to him, for breaking this rule.

Marya is thankful for mercy, in whatever form it comes.

She gathers her shawl and her reticule, and turns to look at Nikolenka one more time—for the last time, she knows even if she cannot bring herself to admit it. He does not look at her, but stares dully straight ahead, under the guards’ watchful eyes.

“I shall pray for you,” she says, endeavoring to sound strong. “Remember. It will be all right.”

They escort her from the battlements in silence.

Pierre has sent a carriage for her, and within minutes she is bundled into it, with a blanket and a cup of tea and a hot brick for her feet. Only then does she realize how freezing she was. How freezing he must still be. The air outside is cold but clear; she can hear the happy cries of the street merchants, can smell chestnuts roasting. She closes her window.

The icon won’t protect him. She knows it, somewhere deep in her heart. Andrei wore it all through the war, and it did not save him. Marya knows better now: the workings of God are mysterious. They cannot be directed so certainly by human hands. And yet it was imperative that she give it to him. That, she supposes, is the mystery, the belief despite the uncertainty. And if there were no uncertainty, would there be any need for belief?

She will light a candle for him when she gets home—not home to the Bezukhovs’, where she is staying, but home to Bald Hills. A candle, an icon, in the little village church. She will set out tomorrow. There is nothing left for her here.

And she will pray for him. She knows that he will scoff at it, and that Andrei would quietly think her a fool. And she knows better than anyone that a prayer is not a guarantee. But she believes that it will matter. She has to believe. Believing, in such a circumstance, is the only thing she still knows how to do.

The carriage rolls through the gate of the fortress, across the bridge and back into the living city, and Marya can’t find it in her to look back.

**Author's Note:**

> It's not technically canon that Nikolenka Bolkonsky joins the Decembrist Revolt, because the book ends in 1820, but this was supposed to be the central plot of Tolstoy's planned-but-never-completed sequel to W&P, and it is kind of set up in the epilogue. It's always what I've imagined happening, in any case.
> 
> Originally this was meant to be more about Marya processing Nikolenka's involvement and eventual exile in terms of the vaguely-alluded Bolkonsky history of military service and political intrigue, hence the title. It ended up as more of a very angsty exploration of the Marya-Nikolenka dynamic, plus Nikolai and The Legacy of Andrei. It's...a lot? 
> 
> (Anyway, a lot of the Decembrists survived the early years of exile and lived comfortable, relatively happy lives in the territories to which they were sent. So: don't worry. Nikolenka is going to wind up building a nice little house in Irkutsk and, according to Wikipedia, contributing significantly to the economic and cultural development of Siberia.)


End file.
